Tag Archives: backup to disk

In today’s datacenter no matter how much de-duplication, storage-tiering, and archiving companies attempt to throw at an issue, there still seems to be an explosion of information that has to be backed up, protected, restored and archived. I’ve stopped being surprised each time I’ve asked a customer how their backup window is doing. It’s always horrible and out of control. Even with advanced data de-duplication it still surprises me at the responses I get. Not to mention, most of the time customers are running out of power, cooling as well as rackspace in their datacenters. All of this becomes a sort of “Perfect Storm” that has the potential to sink the datacenter into a mess of inefficiencies.

So as I’ve discussed in the past, I get to spend a lot of time architecting solutions. One of the things I spend a lot of time helping design is solutions to help eliminate performance bottlenecks. The great news is I feel pretty strongly that we have a solution that is best in the industry. Imagine if you could eliminate storage as a potential bottleneck as well as reduce your power, cooling and overall carbon footprint with one storage solution? Awesome right!!! What if I told you that Xiotech has the fastest, best throughput raid-protected spinning media solution in the market today (by Storage Performance Council SPC-2)? What if I also told you that not only is it the fastest, but it’s also the most greenest (is that a word?) as well? You would probably tell me I was full of…well you know. This 3U storage element packs a wallop of performance. If you haven’t had a chance, you should check out this recent press announcement. In it we talk about a single Emprise 5000 having the ability to simultaneously power 750 DVD quality video streams, 25,000 MP3’s or 4 Studio-class movie editing projects. For those of you that are familiar with this types of performance hogging applications you know that in 3U of space, that’s pretty cool!! We even mention having the equivalent of operating every movie theater screen in the state of Colorado at the same time from one system. You know on a side note, after 10 years here at Xiotech – how come I don’t have one in my entertainment center yet!!! Brian Reagan – maybe you can make this happen for me 🙂

You probably noticed that I haven’t even touched on how we can reduce the carbon footprint!! We have a cool little feature that is native in our Emprise 5000 product called “PowerNap”. Not only is it native, but it’s also FREE!! PowerNap utilizes industry-standard Wake on LAN (WOL) technology. This gives the end user an incredible ability to power up and down the Emprise 5000 solution via scripts or cron jobs.

Here is something I like to take prospects through. Let’s say you run a VTL (or backup to disk process) type solution for backup or archiving. With PowerNap, you can run a simple Perl or PowerScript, as part of a backup process, to spin up the Emprise 5000. So you kick off your backups at 6pm, it takes just 60 seconds to bring the Emprise 5000 from 24watts of power, up to the full operating power draw of around 500 watts. Impressive right!! So, during the day the unit stays in a low power draw state, only drawing 24 watts of power. NOW THAT’S GREEN!!!! Let’s say that during the day you need to do a quick restore. You run your restore process within your backup software solution and part of the restore process is to run the script to spin up the unit. Once the file has been restored, the backup application can issue another script to “PowerNap” the unit. By the way, we have a great “BestPractice Guide”. If you are interested in it, follow me on twitter and send me a message. I’ll send it over to you.

Did I mention the Emprise 5000 comes with FREE 5 Year Hardware Maintenance and the PowerNap feature is FREE TOO!!!! In the “me-too” world of Storage array features and functions, it’s things like PowerNap and blazingly fast performance like this that make me happy to go to work each and every day !!